Re: download mailing list archives

On Fri, Feb 07, 2025 at 01:03:11PM +0100, Jan Stary wrote:

>> I was able to find a subset of archives available to download from 
>>https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/ but they are in 
>>plain text format. This is fine as a last resort, but not ideal.
>
>mbox _is_ a plaintext format (obviously). Just download
>https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2021-May.txt.gz
>gunzip it and run mutt -f (or whatever) on it.

The original poster meant that, in messages in those archives, any MIME 
type other than plain text is removed.

Pipermail is part of the mailing list server Mailman 2 (now dead).  I 
believe pipermail is what makes those list archives available through 
the website provided by Mailman 2.  As presented there, messages are 
stripped down to minimal form, pre-MIME, a single piece of ASCII text.  
Most headers are removed too.

For example, the entire body of the first message in the example file 
you gave is this:

--------------

An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: not available
URL:
+<http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/attachments/20210501/ac015edf
+/attachment.ksh>

--------------

I just now pointed a web browser at that URL, and got 404 Not Found.  
Even if that stripped attachment were available, the original message's 
MIME structure would be lost.

Also, mbox damages some messages, with irreversible ">From " escaping.  
That breaks cryptographic signatures -- well, I guess those signatures 
are stripped off by pipermail.  Anyway, maildir does not damage messages.

I agree with the original poster: I would like archived messages to be 
the complete original MIME messages, as sent to the list, and presented 
in a storage format that does not damage them (not mbox).